Estimating the need for palliative care at the population level: A cross-national study in 12 countries

Abstract

These estimations of the size of the population potentially in need of palliative care provide robust indications of the challenge countries are facing if they want to seriously address palliative care needs at the population level.

How many people will need palliative care in 2040? Past trends, future projections and implications for services

“…The ICD-10-based palliative care estimate uses an evidence-based code filter which has been developed iteratively over several years, and has been tested internationally [21]. In reality, the situation is more complex than our estimates suggest, since the large majority of people who die, especially those dying at older ages, will have more than one illness before they die [48, 49].…”

“…We used ICD-10 diagnostic codes previously used to estimate population palliative care need (Table 1) [21, 22], and defined a person requiring palliative care as someone dying from an illness with an included ICD-10 code [22]. We calculated the percentage of deaths from these codes out of all deaths in a calendar year, which gave our prevalence estimate of palliative care need.…”

“…Current population needs for palliative care have been estimated in several countries using different methods for its measurement [21, 22], based on patient diagnoses [22–24], symptom prevalence [25] and population surveys [5, 26]. Most of these methods produce broadly similar results in terms of how many people are estimated to need palliative care [5, 22, 24–26], although additional data sources can increase sensitivity [22, 27].…”

A gap between the philosophy and the practice of palliative healthcare: sociological perspectives on the practice of nurses in specialised palliative homecare

“…An estimated 65% of the dying population in Sweden, and other high-income countries, will require palliative care (Morin et al 2017). Development of palliative services in the community is increasing.…”

IDentification of patients in need of general and specialised PALLiative care (ID-PALL©): item generation, content and face validity of a new interprofessional screening instrument.

“…Proportions of patients with PC needs varies (9%-73%), and people are often identified late, which bears important consequences for care (9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). These consequences include, but are not limited to (i) excess hospital mortality, whereby 80% of palliative patients die in hospital when the majority of people wish to die at home (19,20); (ii) suboptimal symptom management (21)(22)(23); (iii) unplanned hospitalisations with long hospital stays (24,25); (iv) prescription of inappropriate treatments due to a lack of advance care planning (26,27); and, (v) insufficient support for the patient and their relatives (24,28,29).…”